The Loveland Blog

Loveland is very happy to share the public release of 3csmapping.com, featuring our next generation of city mapping and property dashboards.

The 3Cs project is a partnership with the Western Reserve Land Conservancy and JPMorgan Chase to provide community mapping and
surveying tools for Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus, Ohio. It is also a partnership with a growing number of local organizations who are using and contributing to the data.

Visit 3csmapping.com to jump right in, or press play on the video and scroll down for an overview.

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Here's a quick walkthrough of the new superpowers on the site:

1. Explore the maps

Click around the maps to see parcel-level data for cities and neighborhoods, including property ownership, zoning, sale prices, and taxes. Click "Explore datasets" to open up a panel with additional datasets for each city. Click "Add to Map" to visualize the dataset. Click Query to further filter the data on the map.

If you have a spreadsheet with an address, parcel ID, or latitude-longitude column, you can easily visualize it on the map and share it with other people. Click "Explore datasets" and then click "Add your own data." From there you simply import your file and then give it a name, description, and credit the source. It's never been easier to make and share awesome maps. We're signing up data partners in each city who want to help find and update new information. If you're interested, or if you need data that's not currently on the map, please email team@makeloveland.com.

3. Survey properties

Download the Loveland Survey App for iPhone or Android to photograph to photograph and survey properties from the field. Each city starts with a Sandbox Survey where you can test out sending pictures and information to the public map. Watch out for official citywide and neighborhood surveys, and if you want to start your own public survey, email team@makeloveland.com.

But wait. Are you one of the 96 out of 100 Americans who doesn't live in the great state of Ohio? Would you like to see these kinds of mapping capabilities in your city or state? Let us know. We're looking for a few more cities (or towns or counties or states) to work with this year. You can reach us at team@makeloveland.com.

All the best from Detroit, land of enchantment (with all due respect to New Mexico),

Alright busy people, before diving into a New Year update, let me put 2 opportunities at the very top:

1.) Want to contribute to the public map, no experience required?

We've assembled more than 134 million US parcels on makeloveland.com (translation: that's an awful lot). We want to keep the data flowing for you, so we're preparing to make it drop dead simple for anyone with a spreadsheet that has addresses, coordinates, OR parcel IDs to easily publish it to the public map where everyone can see it. If you, your city, county, state, or organization has data you want to publish, please reach out to us at team@makeloveland.com so we can bring you into the beta. Or heck, if you don't have data but you want to seek it out and add it to the public map because it sounds fun and interesting, please let us know. This is going to be really cool and create a lot of new local and national insights. Don't worry if you don't have prior experience. We're making it easy.

2.) Can we help you accomplish something in 2017?

While we're only a couple of days into the year, 2017 still has its new year smell, so it's the right time to decide to take charge and Do Something Great, dang it, before inertia grabs you and your ambition starts wanting to sleep in til noon. If there's a mapping, surveying, data wrangling, consulting, or research project we can help you with this year, just give us a shout to discuss it. Our mapping tools can help you do a lot right out of the box, we love to partner on interesting projects, and we certainly aren't afraid of challenging situations. Approaching property, planning, and land use challenges with great technology, creative thinking, practical strategies, and a good attitude is sort of our thing.

OK, now on to the wider update:

Happy New Year to everyone who's followed, supported, and/or found value in our work over the years. It's always an adventure, but 2016 seems to have been a pretty weird year for almost everyone. Must be something in the air as more people and things come online for the first time and start to connect. It's like the world is between eras and everything feels out of socket. Without clear leaders or examples of how to navigate whatever exactly has changed, an uncertain mood has set in.

Just like you are, we're also surfing the change. In 2017 we'll be making some really significant updates that we hope you'll love, and that we hope keep us adaptive to all the change that's happening.

We're working on folding our professional mapping tools and our free information together into one clear site at loveland.world that's dedicated to putting everything you wanted to know about and do with property together in one place. Something we've wrestled with over the years is that we're very good (or very bad ) at spinning up new sites, which can be refreshing, but can also end up being confusing.

So there will be one site where you can freely look up information, and from which you easily upgrade to professional tools in your own private workspace. Hurrah. (Note: For existing customers nothing will change besides things continuing to get better and better.)

Crucially, we're also going to open up the site so that anyone who has property or spatial data can easily publish it to the public map. Our little team has done an incredible job assembling a nationwide dataset of parcels. Now it's time to open things up for anyone with a spreadsheet who wants to give it a name and a description and share it with the world. We're also preparing to plug into more live open data portals, and make it easy for cities to publish directly to Loveland.

If we do it properly, there will be a LOT more data flowing through Loveland in more places around the country, and the world. Heck, there'll even be a lot more in Detroit.

So stay tuned, and if there's a project you want to work on with us in 2017, drop us a line at team@makeloveland.com. In addition to updating the platform, we're suckers for helping partners with interesting projects and challenges. (You'll see some new project releases in some new cities coming out soon. )

To our customers, our users, our partners, our neighbors, our friends, our community: all of the best from our team, thank you for your support, and Happy New Year,

Northeast end of 11200 Block of Maiden Street, 2010 vs. 2016. Drag slider to see change.

I've kept track of the neighborhood around the shuttered Alexander Macomb Elementary School on Detroit's east side for a few years now, since I surveyed the area using Google Street View Time Machine imagery in this Loveland blog post. One block in particular has kept my attention:

11200 block of Maiden Street, between Conner and Gunston

In 2014, after surveying the block with a combination of Google Street View Time Machine imagery and in-person surveys using Loveland's Site Control, I created a chart that showed the number of occupied vs. vacant homes vs. tax foreclosures on Maiden's 11200 block between 2008 and 2014. It was, I thought, a useful demonstration of the fact that where there is tax foreclosure, there will be vacant homes and, thus, declining population, declining tax revenue, and increasing blight.

Last week, on August 11th, 2016, I went back out to the 11200 block to resurvey the street and see how things had changed since my last visit, and to add another frame to the chart tracking vacancy and foreclosure.

I resurveyed the 34 properties on the block and found that the trajectory the street has followed since the financial crisis continues today. The chart below shows the number of occupied homes, vacant homes, and cumulative tax foreclosures on Maiden's 11200 block between August 2008 and August 2016:

While there's not much left to go vacant, another property or two has emptied. Two of the properties that may still be occupied look squatted in -- one appeared to have drug activity outside it, and another was in rough shape and missing utility meters outside. Severe fires have caused the collapse of 2 additional structures since 2014, and significant damage to 5 others, like 11313 Maiden, seen here.

The most notable change since 2014 is not the slight increase in vacancy or foreclosure, but the deterioration of property conditions on the block. The bar chart below compares the conditions of the 21 structures on Maiden Street as of January 2014, when the block was surveyed as part of Motor City Mapping, and when I resurveyed the street in August 2016:

The number of houses in "Poor" or "Suggest Demolition" condition doubled -- from 6 in 2014, to 12 in 2016. Houses in "Fair" or "Good" condition decreased from 15 in 2014, to 9 in 2016. There has been one demolition on the block since 2008.

As tax delinquency and foreclosure begets blight and vacancy, there is little evidence of a change of fortunes ahead for the 11200 block of Maiden Street: Of the 34 properties on the block, 22 are owned (via foreclosure) by the city or land bank, and 12 are still privately held. Of those 12 privately held, 8 are behind on their property taxes, and headed for foreclosure over the next couple years.

Put another way, of the 34 parcels on the 11200 block of Maiden Street, only 4 appear to be generating any property tax revenue.

If you'd like to explore the latest survey data, photography, and property conditions on Maiden Street, you can do so in the Site Control map below: